Popular entries

Recent entries

This Monday Sucks a Little Less

№80

26 Mar. 2012, ~4 minutes

InLife

In which I make a chart depicting the levels Days of the week sucks and get a coffee delivery from the UK.

Some times Mondays just suck, don’t they? Probably where they expression “Having a case of the Mondays” comes from. As a “fun” exercise, if you type in “mondays sucks” into Google you get about 130 000 000 (130 million) results. No try typing in “fridays sucks” and you’re presented with a measly 5 370 000 results.

In fact…

Because I love statistics and will take any excuse to make a chart of any kind, here’s a handy chart depicting the amount of “sucks” for every day of the week, so illustrate how much Mondays suck more than any other day of the week.

Fun fact, Monday is pretty tightly followed by Thursday.. I didn’t expect that but I suppose it makes sense in a Western work week sort of way.

I wonder if xkcd has ever done this joke?

So why am I bringing this up? Well, because despite the fact that Mondays clearly “statistically” speaking sucks more than any other day, this Monday sucks significantly less. Why? Because of coffee of course, my dear readers.

Today my “long” — and by “long” I mean it got blended/roasted/shipped last Wednesday, but I am a very impatient man — awaited coffee arrived in our mailbox. Many thanks to everyone at eightpointnine, and more so to Kris and Jess. Now I want to make some things clear right of the bat. I am a single estate kind of coffee drinker. I don’t want my delicious beans blended and diluted to form an incoherent drink that lacks character. That hasn’t changed one tiny bit, it’s just how I like my coffee not to say that there’s anything wrong with liking blends or anything. It’s just a personal preference.

But if I were to prefer blends over single estate coffee, by God I would order it from eightpointnine.com. The reason I felt the need to point out my liking of single estate isn’t because I am a pompous buffoon, it’s because I have tried many blends and never liked a single one. It’s always been something too wrong with them to make me want to include them in my repertoire of beans. I think I’m inclined to change my mind now, or at the very least, consider the fact that “Yeah, I could add a blend to my repertoire”.

Itella however should really get their shit together.

The verdict

Wonderful sweetness. Excellent mouth-feel. Appropriate acidity (I like mine less). The figs had more of a side role, which is where I like my figs. The caramel-y butterscotch-y-ness was quite present through and through, very nice. The only drawback is the lack of character that I suspect is a bit of a curse and blessing with blends, for comparison I can easily recall the flavour profile of Monsooned Malabar even though it’s been months since I drank any. I can imagine “forgetting” the profile of this coffee because it doesn’t give me a tangible note to hang on to. But at the same time I am already wanting to have another cup of it. So maybe the lack of character is balanced out by it’s stability in flavour instead. Because this feels like a consistent coffee. Having said all of that I am giving this a 4+ out of 5.

For those interested, my personal blend — You can design your own blend — consists of 96% Colombian, 2% Brazilian and 2% Costa Rican and packs a rich mouth-feel and sweetness to it. Eightpointnine recommends having a coffee-to-water ratio of .055 when brewing coffee, which is definitely a good ratio but I like mine at .066. Which means instead of 16,5 grams to 300 grams of water I use 19,8 grams. But out of curiosity I am going to try their ratio too.

Eightpointnine doesn’t ship internationally.. yet. But as soon as they do, you owe it to yourself to try them out. You can even get the first box for free using either of these codes (8PT9FREE or GQ94BTN) so you what are you waiting for?

…right.. international shipping. Unless you live in the UK, in which case. Go! Order now! Let me know, what you thought?